About Me

Friday, 8 September 2017

Architecting your Digital Enterprise

Digital
Digital Digital! Is it a Buzz word or is it another technology hype like the
past?

I
don’t think so, because it’s about business existence now, which was not the
case in past. The technology advancement is happening with great pace and with
the evolution of smart devices the customer expectation around the experience
they can have, has changed all together.

We
are heading towards the experience era – It’s happening now and customer
experience network is the way forward.

Business Goal

The goal to onboard the digital transformation is to derive business value that's based on experience offerings -

Where do you stand in terms of Business value from your offerings in the market?

Are you ready for it?Let’s see, what needs to be done to onboard.

Digital Foundation

I
believe it’s the Leadership team who have to focus on laying the foundation and
everyone in the enterprise have to contribute to be part of it.

Digital Enterprises have
strong foundation if they are based on three key elements –

Dynamic Culture

Innovation

Smart Collaboration

Digital Pillars

Once
the foundation is laid, you will need the pillars to support the digital
initiatives.

Data – Realise the power of data. In next couple of years there will be
immense amount of data that will be generated and enterprises have to make sure
that they drive value out of it, both for the enterprise and for customers.
Innovation will happen on top of the data set that you have with the help of
different technologies.

Technology – Technology advancements are happening with great
speed and are bringing disruption in the industry. Either adopt it for creating
business value or become a failure story for others to get motivated.

Below depict the typical
traditional Enterprise Architecture with Legacy applications, file based or web
services based integrations running on physical servers or partially on virtual
machines(VM).

Map
your portfolio of applications to the 3rd generation products and
platform services-

3rd generation is
about Cloud, Mobility, Social network, IoT, Big data and analytics.

So, first thing is to map the
architecture layer and see what your target would look like. This will give you
your inspiration that where you want to be in next couple of years from your
technology stack perspective.

Add a Secure Glue

To transform and adopt
digital pillars you will need a secure glue to talk to different components of
the ecosystem and that glue comes from API’s. Secure way of communicating with
internal and external components.

·API is the secure glue to connect with multiple technologies
and applications across the ecosystem.

·Move towards API{1st}

·Wrap and enable your legacy with API

It’s
not only the secure glue, it more than that. It’s platform for innovation. You
can’t innovate if you don’t have an interface to explore the process or data.
It’s the innovation channel for everything that you do in the enterprise
(internal or external).

Sometimes
API’s are like lego blocks, even the producer doesn’t know the real beauty of
it and is only known when an external developer builds an innovative product or
service from it.

To-Be Architecture

You can’t move big bang from
what you have in the ecosystem. So as first step of the To-Be state the old and
new world has to co-exist with the balance of having lights on (BAU) and in
parallel doing innovative things in small perimeter.

Introduce
RED blocks to start with and gradually add green boxes. In some cases, based on
the maturity level of the enterprise it will be essential to have RED and some
parts of green blocks added in parallel. Like adding Micro Services and Digital
Marketing applications but leave BigData/Analytics and Containers to follow.

Logical View

Logically Application
Governance should look something like below-

MFT proxy in DMZ and B2B might
be fronted by API Management if required to keep one channel.

Infrastructure View

Over the period your infrastructure
will shape like this -

Key Considerations for Transformation -

Consider
having first class security.

Legacy
modernisation should not end up in legacy.

Move
away from monolith to modular applications.

Choose
the right technology for specific use case.

Start
small, learn fast and scale quickly.

Focus
on Devops to optimize cost and Time to deliver.

There
is no silver bullet, do due-diligence based on your ecosystem and find the
right approach to modernize.

Hope this helps you take up
your Digital Transformation and shape you Organisation into Digital one.